Archery has undergone great development in recent years, and the high-performance equipment designed to satisfy the required expectations has been significantly improved.
Thus, for 10 years all bows have had the same structure and the same general characteristics associated with the proper functional conditions of competitive archery. For practical reasons, they are most often collapsible, made up of a bow body and two flexible end branches detachably fastened to the body of the bow, intended for stretching the bowstring.
The branches constitute the flexible parts of the bow that store the potential energy when the bowstring is placed under tension. In collapsible bows they have a fastening shoulder at one end that permits them to be mounted on the body of the bow. At the other end these branches have a tip and a nock for placing the bowstring.
The body of the bow, which is its central part, has three principal elements, specifically:
the window where the accessories for aiming and supporting the arrow are fastened, particularly the spreader system that permits separating the arrow more or less from the body of the bow;
the grip for gripping and holding the bow;
the mounts for fastening the branches most often being done by means of a screw system.
Added to these principal elements are a number of additional elements, including stabilizers composed of a stock of variable length on which may slide a poise of variable weight, with the stock being screwed to the body of the bow through a connection damper. The function of these stabilizers is to balance the bow and to absorb some of the vibrations.
The vibrational behavior of the bow proves to be complex and the source of problems that may become major. Actually, the vibrations generated by shooting are propagated in the various elements of the bow and are transmitted harmfully to the user's wrist. They affect the precision of shooting and divert the bow after shooting, sometimes in an uncontrollable manner.
The stabilizers presently used do not constitute a satisfactory solution because of their low efficiency in neutralizing vibrations.
Another difficulty consists of the nature and reduced capabilities of the spreader system intended for aligning the position of the arrow before shooting. Actually, the known spreader systems generally permit only a single adjustment of the position of the arrow, which can be only separated more or less from the body of the bow, but whose position cannot be changed in height.